Alan Singer calls out Common Core for the poor showing of US students on PISA.
Remember all the promises about how Common Core would raise all test scores and close gaps? Nada.
Of course, the deeper issue is that decades of test-and-punish reforms failed, not just Common Core.
it those who pushed these failed policies will not abandon them. They will say—they are saying—that we must double down on failure.
The consensus among governors and policy elites that followed “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was that common standards, tests, and accountability would lead to high levels of performance (ie, test scores).
They didn’t. They haven’t. They won’t.
Almost four decades later, we can safely say that this theory of reform has failed. Billions of dollars wasted!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Far more important than the billions of dollars wasted is the billions of hours and millions of lives wasted.
Of course, the deformers won’t ever mention the millions of school children and teachers that their policies have affected because to do so would be to admit that they have experimented on humans without informed consent , which violates the Nuremberg code set up to prevent a repeat of Nazi experimentation on human subjects.
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Lest anyone doubts the billions of hours wasted claim.
There are some 60 million k-12 students in the US. If one assumes that even half of them devoted just two weeks (60 hours) in a given year to testing, that’s 1.8 billion overall student hours wasted for just a single year!
Multiply that by 3 decades and it comes out 54 billion student hours.
No small potatoes — and I’d guess it is probably a gross underestimate of the number of students hours wasted on testing, Common Core and various and sundry other deformer crap.
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Those are hours that people like George W. Bush, Barack Obama,
Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, David Coleman, Jason Zimba and others STOLE from our children — and they will never get them back.
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not to mention how many essential veteran teaching careers were stolen: the entire system has been irrevocably weakened
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The purpose of the deforms were never to improve education, but to control. This is what governments do when they go FASCIST.
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This is right here. Nothing less than this right here.
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More and more I feel that that’s what’s been achieved: centralized control. I never thought I would feel so powerless. That resistance is futile.
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“Poor performance on these tests, especially by students in the lower rankings, is evidence that the United States continues to fail to provide a quality education for many of its minority and immigrant students and for children in states like Alabama and Mississippi where public education is poorly funded, a remnant of their history of deep-seated racism and segregation.” From Mr Singer’s article.
I did not need the expensive experience of tests to know this. Nor did I require the testing to spot the miserable failure of NCLB, RTT, Charters, Vouchers, VAMS, and the rest of the reform movement. Still, since the reform movement itself was predicated on the idea of testing, it must accept its failure, owning it the way the movement tried to pawn off societal ills on the teachers.
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Testing is no solution to improving education. In fact, high stakes over testing is a big part of the problem. Students are not really reading, writing and thinking. They are reading excerpts of literature and content. They are going through common core mathematical gyrations without really understanding the fundamental reasons for doing so. Their entire education is being reformatted to adapt to computer assisted instruction with multiple choice options as the “finished product.” An answer in a bubble is no product of learning.
Reflecting on my own education, I learned the most when I was asked to write papers on a particular topic. I sometimes had to research, organize and produce a document, or response to literature or a topic. Most of all I really had to think! All of this had nothing to do with the existence of a national curriculum. It had a lot more to do with the depth of mental engagement. We are short changing our young people with our testing and technology obsession.
We need to get corporations that seek to sell products out of our schools so teachers can return to real learning without outside interference. We have had twenty years of outside interference, and our young are paying the price for our mistakes.
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I completely agree about learning the most from writing papers.
I was a science major in college, but where I really learned to think critically was in high school English class.
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The very idea that one needs all the deformer junk (Common Core, testing, close reading, tech mediated personalized learning) to learn to think is just absurd on its face.
Humans learned quite well before all this crap and will learn just fine (better, in fact) long after it has been thrown on the trash heap.
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Come to think of it, maybe that’s why techies are, on the whole, such shallow thinkers.
They paid too much attention to writing code and not enough attention to writing papers.
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You could train a monkey to write code.
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And some of them would undoubtedly do it better than some computer “science” (sic) grads.
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This dumbing down of curricula and pedagogy is THE most salient consequence of decades of “standards”-and-testing-based Deform. During this whole period, off and on, I worked for a wide variety of educational publishers, doing freelance product development. I saw this first hand, how the insipid, puerile Gates/Coleman bullet lists became the defacto curriculum map. Sickening.
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These are the actual consequences of the past few decades of Ed Deform–trivialization of U.S. K-12 curricula in ELA and developmental inappropriateness in mathematics curricula. And, ofc, enormous waste and diversion of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of Deform profiteers.
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I’m not sure “dumbing down” is the right term. Much of the math and ELA is hard –too hard. And gratuitously hard –pain without gain. “Ill-conceived” seems more accurate.
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I think of it as reductionism. Instead of expanding on ideas and concepts, students are asked to select from options from a list as they are presented on standardized tests. Students do not get a chance to to describe, defend, expand or analyze ideas, particularly in the content is delivered via computer.
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Ponderosa: both dumbing down and trivializing. But yes, dumb AND complex, often.
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The obfuscation of the obvious
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Common Core authors re-branded confusion as rigor. Nasty trick if you can get professional educators to buy it. Oops!
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That’s the horrifying thing–that the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the associated tests weren’t laughed off the national stage almost immediately. That they weren’t is very, very troubling.
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Bob
I think they were not laughed of the stage because the people who knew best — the teachers — were essentially silenced by policies like VAM and threats that they would be fired if they pushed back.
The whole VAMming policy (which I am pretty sure came from Bill Gates, although it was implemented by Arne Duncan in Face to the Top) was actually quite clever because it had the effect of ensuring that the people best qualified and most likely to call BS were censured at the getgo.
Call me a conspiracy theorist , but the whole thing was quite well coordinated and I’m positive that Arne Duncan is nowhere near smart enough to have dreamed up the master plan.
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Yes. I think you are right. I have seen many teachers cowed into silence. And you are doubtless right about Duncan.
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I’d love to see all the emails between Duncan and Gates.
Perhaps the Russians can locate them😂
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I’d also like to see the emails between Randi Weingarten and Gates. Her early support for Common Core, Testing and VAM did not just come out of the blue.
She didn’t just decide on a whim one day, “Hey, maybe I should support this stuff.” Sorry, but that ain’t believable.
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Changes which are made will have to give teachers a bigger role, foster respect for teachers, allow time for them to speak with each other more to solve school problems. The corporate reformers are limited in views and money driven with malnourished views of education.
It is time to give teachers a bigger and more autonomous role.
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Billions. That could have been spent on eyeglasses and warm coats for the winter and food in their bellies and a safe place to play and study after school for poor kids.
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I think kids have really internalized the idea that the point of the thing is to score well on a standardized test. They believe this.
Like a lot of districts in Ohio, our schools offer the ACT free to all students now. They also mandate a practice ACT test if you want to take the free test. I was talking with my son and his friends about these tests and there’s just no recognition at all that the tests might measure something other than ACT test-taking. I was trying to get them to back up a little and connect it some way to what they have done for the last 10 years in school but that isn’t how they look at it. They’re prepping for a test. The test is the goal.
It makes sense that they would look at it like this- it is all they’ve ever known. They never attended a public school that wasn’t measured this way. Any adult who is kidding themselves into thinking the kids don’t measure their value with these scores is not talking to them. They not only know their own ACT score, they know everyone else’s. And it’s ONE number. They are absolutely relying solely on this one number as a kind of proxy for “success”. What did we expect? They’re not educational researchers. They don’t have any context for any of this. Maybe theirs is the most honest take and they simply don’t believe it when we tell them they’re “more than a score” because that isn’t what they see.
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“They never attended a public school that wasn’t measured this way.”
And they have never attended a public school that was measured this way.
There is no measurement going on. Yes, there are assessments, evaluations and judgments going on but no measurement.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Thoset supposedly objective results (they aren’t at all) are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
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To answer the question:
Nothing.
Nothing can truly be learned from an error and falsehood filled educational malpractice.
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The Common Core is not the only reason that PISA scores for US students are not that great.
I suggest this move for readers. Check out the reading items for PISA where questions are supposed to be life relevant and somehow essential in every country where the test was administered.
The tests are for 15-year old students. Also pay attention to the disclaimers in this presentation, on pages 6 and 7 Others are scattered in later sections of this report. The report is from the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Yes, the American contractor for the PISA tests was ETS. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/PISA2018_Released_REA_Items_12112019.pdf
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And here is where you can find sample questions for NAEP tests, recent and dating back in time, all tested subjects.
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/booklets.aspx
I would like to see a requrement that politicians who call for test like these must take them and have the results published, then reduced to a letter grade if that is state policy.
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Great idea! Then, the results should be published.
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